one thing to my purpose nothing

[angevin2]

Thing that annoys me greatly: this article, which argues that the sonnets prove that Shakespeare was gay and found women repulsive

Thing that annoys me equally greatly: comments to said article which are all "ZOMG NO SHAKESPEARE WASN'T GAY ELIZABETHANS WERE JUST LIKE THAT ABOUT MALE FRIENDSHIP."

*slaps everybody with fish*THIS IS WHY WE HAVE THE

Comments

[17catherines]

Oh, for heaven's sake - he's not misogynist, he's Elizabethan. Of course he doesn't have a 21st century view of women.

Though, actually, I have wondered once or twice whether the tendency of all his strongest female characters to shut right up the moment they become engaged / married at the end of a play was a feminist statement of sorts about the nature of marriage at that time. But I don't really know enough about the period to know whether that is sheer projection on my part.

[capriuni]

What about Paulina? We don't even meet her until after she's married... and she's the only one with the courage to say "boo!" to the king...

Of course, her husband, who gives lip-service to her intelligence, but obeys the king instead, gets eaten by a bear. Then, Paulina is a single woman again, who can get married off, and thus, shut-up. So you might be on to something.

(and I'm a woman with gay men friends... Does this mean they all secretly hate me, behind my back? ohnoes!)

[17catherines]

Yes; I was mostly thinking of the women who start the play single with marriage clearly being their required destiny by the end! Juliet, of course, speaks quite a lot after her marriage, but then, marriage isn't the end-point of her story.

(and I was wondering the same thing as you!)

[tempestsarekind]

I often wonder about this line of reasoning, in that when it happens to a female character it is a Statement About Women, but if/when it happens to a male character, no one notices. For example, it is very possible to argue that Celia doesn't say anything in her final scene of As You Like It. But this is also true of Oliver, the man she marries, and in that case it seems like ignoring that fact is a potential misreading; if marriage silences people, it silences them both equally. Or with Viola from Twelfth Night, it's perhaps technically true that she doesn't say anything after she gets engaged (although that sort of depends on where you draw the "engaged" line--whether at or after "Give me thy hand, / And let me see thee in thy woman's weeds"), but so much of the rest of the scene is about Malvolio that I don't necessarily think this is a statement about the woman's role in marriage--Sebastian has no lines after the twin plot wraps up, after all.

Both of these are unlike the case of, say, Isabella from Measure for Measure, where

[a_t_rain]

Isn't representing heterosexual desire as frustrating, problematic, and ultimately unfulfilled and unfulfilling kind of the point of a sonnet sequence? (I mean, OK, there's Amoretti, but by the time Shakespeare came along it had already been done.)

I'll grant that there is slightly more warrant for reading early modern sonnets autobiographically than for reading early modern plays autobiographically, but both are pretty silly.

[elettaria]

Ah, this is clearly written by a gay man who went out unsuccessfully with a bisexual man whose next partner was a woman, and who decided that this was clearly why the relationship didn't work, and therefore that he was allowed to loathe all bisexuals and sort-of-hate women for luring perfectly nice men away from him. (Or in other words, my partner's ex.)

[cisic]

Shakespeare was not a misogynist. Johnson, yes. Shakespeare, no.

[angevin2]

Jonson was basically a perpetual-motion hate machine!